THE MACHINEServant or Master?

The predominant conception of the machine's use makes it to-day an enemy of

art and fine Uving, declares Mr. Mumford, but great possibiUties are latent in
proper assimilation of our conqueror. A comprehensive and keenly analytical
article on the machine and its relation to human life.

The Drama of the Machines

BY LEWIS MUMFORD
and the scientist; we have alternately
exalted these new instruments for their
practical success, and despised them for
the narrowness of their achievements.
When one examines the subject freshly,
however, many of these estimates are
upset. We find that there are human
values in machinery that we did not suspect; we also find that there are wastes,
losses, perversions of energy which' the
ordinary economist blandly concealed.
The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less
important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

HOUGH we call our period The

Machine Age, very few people
have any perspective upon the machine, or any clear notion of its origins.
A popular historian dates the great
transformation that has taken place with
the invention of Watt's steam-engine;
and in the conventional text-book the
application of mechanical methods to
weaving is usually treated as a critical
turning-point; whereas, like all great
changes, the introduction of the machine was essentially a change of mind,
and it no more depended upon any single invention, like the steam-engine,
than it depended upon any special industry. The gains that the machine has
brought have rarely been balanced up
against the losses; and Mr. Stuart
Chase's recent attempt to do this showed
how intricate and uncertain such an
estimate must be, once one drops the
comfortable Victorian notion that all
change is progress and all progress is
beneficial.
If we wish to have any clear notion
about the machine we must think about
its psychological as well as its practical
origins; and similarly, we must appraise
its aesthetic and ethical results. For a
century we have isolated the technical
triumphs of the machine; we have bowed before the handiwork of the inventor

II
A drama could be made of the coming of the machine into modern society.
Five or six centuries before the main
body of the army forms, spies have been
planted among the nations of Europe.
Here and there, in strategic positions,
small bodies of scouts and observers appear, preparing the way for the main
force: a Roger Bacon, a Leonardo da
Vinci, a Paracelsus. But the army of machines could not take possession of modern society until every department had
been trained; above all, it was necessary
to gather a group of creative minds, a
general staff, who would see a dozen

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T H E D R A M A OF T H E M A C H I N E S
moves beyond the immediate strategy
and would invent a superior tactics.
These are the physicists and mathematicians; without their abstract descriptions, the useful habit of isolating certain movements and sequences would
not have been adopted, and invention
would probably have sought to reproduceas in fact it first didcumbrous
mechanical men or mechanical horses,
instead of their abstract equivalents,
namely, steam-engines, locomotives,
rifles, cranes. Behind the scientific advance-guard came the shock troops, the
miners, the woodmen, the soldiers proper, and their inventive leaders. Five centuries were needed to set the stage for
the modern world.
At last the machines are ready. The
outposts have been planted and the army
trained. Between Dante and John Bunyan there are only four centuries; but
between John Bunyan's Pilgrim and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe there is a whole
epoch: one is interested in his soul, the
other in the ingenious adaptation of his
material environment. What is the order
of the battle, and where does the machine claim its first victory.?
The battle which led to the establishment of the machine as a central force in
Western civilization was a battle in the
most literal sense; for perhaps the chief
incentive to mechanical contrivance has
come, as Jenks observed a generation
ago, from the institution of warfare.
Modern Western society distinguishes
itself from many savage communities,
and from such high civilizations as that
of ancient China, by the application of
a deadly earnestness to the slaughter of
men. Holsti, in his treatise on War and
the State, has pointed out the ritualistic
and playful elements in savage warfare;
but in spite of the prudence and matterof-factness of the professional soldier, a
transformation came about when the

151

ideal of the knightly encounter was exchanged for a relentless combat in the
name of "religion" or freedom. Did
this animus lead to the invention of
more deadly weapons, or did the cannon
and the musket automatically claim
more blood.? Probably both. At all
events, the internal combustion engine
bullets propelled by gunpowderwas
a product of warfare.
The increasing deadliness of armed
combat made, in addition, new demands
upon the art of the smith: first in the
manufacture of fine steel armor, then
with the development of the musket and
the cannon, and finally, in our own day,
with the armored battleship and the
armored tank. These demands both
accelerated the increase in skill and
caused rapid advances in mining and
smelting; and this in turn directed skilled minds to technological processes
which had hitherto been carried on in a
hit-or-miss fashion. Leonardo offered
his services to princes, not to utilize his
skill in painting, but because of his
knowledge of ballistics and fortification,
because he could construct redoubts and
ditches and canals. The division between
the quantitative processes of production,
which became the province of the engineer, and the qualitative interests, which
were relegated to the pure artist, is beautifully illustrated in the conflict that perpetually agitated Leonardo himself.
Roughly, up to his time these processes
were united; thenceforward the practical man and the idealist, the utilitarian
and the aesthete, tended to be separated.
By the time the nineteenth century
opened, the gulf was almost final. The
engineer knew no art; the artist had
few connections with practical life; and
the architect, in whom the traditional
state persisted, lacked the power to integrate these two elements in his designs.

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T H E D R A M A OF T H E M A C H I N E S
III

In back of the soldier stand the woodman and the miner: they are the primitive forms of the modern engineer. A
certain amount of harm has been done,
in interpreting the industrial changes
that have taken place, by confusing derivative agents, like factory production
and the invention of the power-loom,
with the great prime-movers, and the
prime machine-tools themselves. The
woodman was the chief contributor to
the precise arts: a whole tradition of
woodcraft lies in back of the individual
inventions that began to multiply
around 1760 in England. As wheelwright and turner, he produced the
wheels and ratchets necessary for the
first clocks, whose works were made of
wood; in his creation of the engine lathe,
in its earliest form a bent sapling attached for motive power to a shaft, he
handed on the most useful perhaps of
all machine tools, for without it accurate
machines and instruments of measurement could not be made. The woodman
and the smith produced the water-wheel
and the windmill, the first attempts to
transfer the burden of work from the
backs of animals to the impersonal
forces of nature. Directly from the mine
came a contribution which, though not
so fundamental, nevertheless provided
the framework of nineteenth-century
civilization: the railroad, first invented
to facilitate the removal of ore from the
pit; while likewise for the mine, in order to keep the shaft from flooding with
water, the primitive steam-engine was
invented.
Once these key inventions were
planted, once the General Staff was
ready to supply a general stream of abstract ideas and suggestions, the time
had come for the tnachine to take possession of Western civilization: at last

the derivative products of industrialism

could spawn and multiply. From the
woodman's primitive distillation of tar
to the thousand dyes and medicines and
poisons that come from the destructive
distillation of coal, from the soldier's
gunpowder and cannons and pontoons
to the rock-dynamiting, foundationdigging, bridge-building, and road-laying of to-day; from the sailor's rough
steering by sun and the North star and
the magnetic needle to the accurate
trigonometrical calculations and chronometer readings of modern navigationall this is a difference of extent
and accuracy but not of kind. The machine brought with it great gains in
mechanical efficiency; unfortunately,
since it derived so much of its technic
and animus from the destructive arts of
mining and warfare, these gains were
offset by a loss of human purpose. The
ideology of physical science reinforced
these original weaknesses: for its method was to isolate and dismember human
experience, reduce every aspect of it to
its quantitative relations, and remove,
as a source of error, the human personality itself. In the abstract world of
physical science there was no more place
for human purpose than there was a
place for thoughts and dreams in the
motions of pistons or a place for worksongs in the pounding of trip-hammers.
The machine was more efficient than a
human being, partly because of new
sources of power, and partly because its
functions were completely stripped of
irrelevant aims or interests.
The advantages of the machine that
have been most readily appreciated have
been the tapping of new natural sources
of power, moving air, running water,
coal, petroleum, gas, and the substitution of mechanical labor for both the
creative energy of the handicraft artist
and the deadening routine of the servile

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THE D R A M A OF T H E M A C H I N E S
drudge. From the first change we derive
untold quantities of power; from the
second, in so far as the machine has been
able to replace human labor completely,
we derive the possibility of freedom
although the specialized factory worker
has lost something of the occupational
variety and human companionship of
the old-fashioned workshop. Neither
freedom nor power is an end in itself: they are conditions of human fulfilment. But it is plain that if the ends
are adequate, a commensurate grasp of
the forces that condition them is a great
boonand if it were a social actuality
and not, as at present, a pious hope, it
would justify almost every boast of the
mechanical apologists. ' The formal
contributions of the machine, on the
other hand, its value for mind and culture, are apparently much more difficult to grasp than its practical success:
indeed, most industrialists would feel
guilty of heresy did they believebut
who in the past was bold enough to suggest it?that the capital achievement
of the machine was an ethical and imaginative one.
Yet the more one reflects upon the
machine, the less important do its practical achievements seem: Mr. Stuart
Chase's contrast between the life of a
modern factory worker and that of a
mediseval villager shows how little of
the sweat and blood and power and
thought of the modern world is actually
consummated in life and artand this
must be the final test of all practical
effort. When one weighs the solid products of the machine against the wholesale destruction it has wrought in a
single century, against the forests that
must be replanted, the foul cities that
must be razed and rebuilt, the depleted
countrysides that must be restored,
against all the irredeemable human misery it has brought into existence, against

its constant threat of universal annihilation by mechanized warfarewhen one

balances these things, the blessings of
the machine seem a httle tainted; and at
all events, we cannot take them for
granted. Potentially, the machine has
removed a part of our drudgery and
routine; actually, the drudgery and
routine remain, only a smaller and
smaller part of society participates in it.
Instead of distributing leisure, our modern industrial societies are burdened
with chronic unemployment, a curse
and not a benefit; and when, to keep
the wheels moving, it forces its ephemeral goods upon the market, it only
turns the laborer into a goods-devouring mechanism, the victim of a servile
system of consumption. What then remains ?
What remains is the technic of co-operative thought and action, the aesthetic
excellences of the machine, and the delicate logic of materials and forces it has
added to the canon of human achievements. Eliminating man, the machine
has nevertheless embodied two of his
deepest desires: the will-to-power and
the will-to-order. It has turned the first
will from the domination of other men
to the domination of nature, and it has
created for the accomplishment of certain material results a universal, language: the language of exact science. If
the goods of industrialism are still largely evanescent, its esthetic is a durable
contribution. The practical results are
often dubious; the methods are excellent. The machine has added a whole
series of arts to those produced by simple tools and handicraft methods. These
arts have their own proper standards
and give their own peculiar satisfaction to the human spirit. What matters
the fact that the ordinary individual is
the master of a hundred mechanical
slaves, if the master himself remain an

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T H E D R A M A OF T H E M A C H I N E S

imbecile ? But if the exact arts produced

by the machine have their own contribution to make to the mind, a gain in intelligence, perception, and feeUng may
follow; and such gains are vital ones indeed. Let us examine the machine more
carefully as an instrument of culture.

ment with which the early engineer

sought to transform his structure into a
veritable work of art: the homage of
hypocrisy. One sees the identical effort
on the earliest type of steam-radiator, in
the floral decorations that originally
graced the typewriter, and in the nondescript arabesque that still quaintly
lingers on shotguns and sewing-maIV
chines.
The difficulty in appreciating the culThis first stage is a compromise. The
tural contribution of the tnachine can object is divided into two parts, one of
best be shown, perhaps, in describings which is to be precisely designed for
the way in which the problem of ma- mechanical efficiency, and the other to
chine design was first faced, then muff- be decorated after the canons of an ened, and finally solved. For the mechani- tirely different kind of art. While the
cal problems were formulated and part- utilitarian claims the structure, which
ly solved long before the aesthetic and must work, the aesthete is permitted
human aspects were taken into consid- slightly to modify the surface with his
eration: the machines became a condi- irrelevant patterns, his plutonic flowtion of our existence before they became ers, or his aimless filigreeprovided
that he does not alter the structure. This
an emotive part of our life.
In the design of the first machines, as compromise satisfied the utilitarian
in the organization of the first factories, longer than it did the romantic; but it
the purely practical considerations were produced a bastard art; a large part of
almost inevitably uppermost, and the our architecture and our American furpersonality was firmly shoved to one niture and our machine-stamped china
side. So universal was this characteristic has long been a witness of this weak dithat, until recent times, the only adjec- vision. Mechanically produced by the
tive that habitually modified the word aid of machinery, it shamefully conceals
factory was "ugly," just as if utilitarian its origins, at the same time that it mocks
structures, a castle, a bridge, a granary, the handicraft to which it claims affiliahad never in the past by any chance been tion.
The next stage in the development of
beautiful. Nevertheless, the elimination
of the human factor had to be justified machine design was the withdrawal of
and somehow compensated. Hence, the utilitarian and the romantic to their
over the incomplete, unrealized forms several parts of the field. The romantic,
of the early machines and bridges a insisting with justice that the structure
meretricious touch of decoration was is integral with the decoration, began to
added, a mere relic of the warm fan- revive by purely handicraft methods the
tasies that painting and carving had arts of the potter and the cabinet-maker
once added to almost every handicraft and the printer, arts which had survived,
object. The Batter sea Bridge in London, for the most part, only in "backward"
the steel work in the lower part of the parts of the world, in the isolated islands
Eiffel Tower, the iron trusses in the old- or mountain areas of Europe, untouched
est section of the Metropolitan Museum by the tourist and the commercial travelexhibit this incised or moulded orna- ler. The old.workshops and ateliers had

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almost died out by the middle of the
nineteenth century in "progressive"
England and America, when new ones,
like those devoted to glass under William de Morgan and John La Farge in
America, or to furniture, such as that
of William Morris, sprang into existence, to prove by their example that,
given leadership and active patronage,
the arts of the past could survive.
But the point was that neither the
patronage nor the problems were the
same. The world that men carried in
their heads, their idolutn, was an entirely different one from that which set the
mediaeval mason to carving the history
of creation or the lives of the saints
above the portals of his cathedral; and
an art based like handicraft upon the
stratification of classes and the social
differentiation of wants could not survive with any certainty in a world that
had witnessed the French revolution
and had been promised a rough share
of equality.
Modern handicraft, which sought to
' rescue the poor worker from the slavery
of shoddy machine production, merely
enabled the rich to enjoy in their own
time an art that was as completely divorced from the social milieu as that
of the palaces and monasteries and
churches the collector had already begun to loot. The educational aim of the
arts and crafts movement was admirable; and in so far as it gave courage
to the amateur worker it was partly a
success. Every modern home is, no matter how unconsciously, the better for the
insistence upon the simplicity and honesty that Morris and his followers made
a principal item in their creed: "Possess
nothing that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." But the
social outcome of the arts and crafts
movement was ridiculous, as Mr. Frank
Lloyd Wright said in his famous speech

155

at Hull House in the nineties; it lacked

the courage to grasp the valuable instruments that the machine had put at
the call of creative purpose, and being
unable to attune itself to new objectives
and new standards, it was almost compelled to restore a medijeval ideology in
order to provide a social backing for its
ante-machine methods. In a word, the
modern arts and crafts movement tended to be weakly retrospective and sentimental. Before handworking could be
restored as an admirable sport and an
efScacious relief from a physically inane
life, it was first necessary to dispose of
the machine as a social instrument. So
the real contribution to art and polity
was made by the industrialist who remained on the job and saw it through.
V
With the third stage in design an
alteration takes place. The imagination
is not applied to the mechanical object
after its functional design has been created: it is infused into it. The spirit
works through the medium of the machine and the conditions imposed by
it; and not content with a crude quantitative expression, it seeks a more positive fulfilment. This must not be confused with the esthetic dogma, so often
current, that mechanical fitness necessarily produces an esthetic result; the
source of this fallacy is that in many
cases our eye has been trained to recognize beauty in nature, in the shapes of
fish and birds; and when an airplane
becomes like a gull, it has the advantage
of this long association, while we ascribe
the beauty to the mechanical adequacy.
When we take an object with no natural
kinships, however, like the old-fashioned telephone transmitter, the theory falls
down: aesthetically, it is a clumsy object
and no amount of a priori theory can
make it anything else.

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Expression through the machine implies, however, the recognition of relatively new aesthetic terms: precision,
calculation, flawlessness, economy, simplicity. Feeling attaches itself, in these
new forms, to different qualities from
those which make handicraft so jolly:
the elegance of a mathematical equation, the inevitability of physical interrelations, the naked quality of the material itself. Who discovered these qualities.'^ Many an engineer and many a
machine worker must have mutely
sensed them, in the act of design or operation; but only after a hundred years
of blind effort were these new feelings
deliberately projected by a group of sensitive painters and sculptors, during the
first decade of the present century. The
Cubists discovered and attached themselves to this world of abstract mathematical relationships and mechanical
technics. A succession of artists. Marcel
Duchamps, Duchamps Villon, Brancusi,
Bracque, Stieglitz, Benton, Baylinson,
Domela-Neuenhuis, revealed in their
paintings and sculptures the new feeling toward form that the machine had
developed. Looking around at our mechanical phantasmagoria, we discovered, through their eyes, a new world; and
we found that our practical expedients,
and our fine utilitarian dodges, had provided us with new symbols and significances.
When this discovery was made, a new
attack upon all the arts became possible.
Hitherto the sole influence upon machine design had been the physical sciences; now the mind had absorbed this
knowledge and had produced a fresh
ideology. The arts flourish when they
are continually played upon by exact
knowledge and practical experience on
one hand, and by the intuitions and creative patterns that arise out of the personality itself on the other; this double

partnership was finally established in

the mechanical arts, and a decisive start
was again made. While in the traditional arts the necessary transformations
came slowly, in the development of entirely new instruments, such as the automobile, the airplane, the modern bathroom, it came by a series of swift innovations, almost under our very eyes.
The key to this transformation was
the discovery of the guiding principle of
machine aesthetics: the principle of economy. Now the aim of design is to remove from the object, be it an automobile or a bedroom, every detail, every
moulding, every variation of surface,
every extra part except that which conduces to its effective function. Le Corbusier has been very ingenious in picking out the manifold objects in which
modern taste has declared itself without
pretense or fumbling. The smokingpipe, for example, is no longer carved
to look like a human head or to bear an
heraldic emblem; it becomes exquisitely anonymous; it is nothing more than
a finely shaped apparatus for supplying
drafts of air from the human mouth to
a slow-burning mass of dry vegetation,
to be held snugly in the hand at appropriate intervals for quiet gesture.
This stripping down to essentials has
gone on in every department where
the machine and its products have been
touched by an appropriate imagination.
We have witnessed the same improvement in design from the ill-balanced
push-power airplane to the modern tractor type; we have seen it in the transformation of the gawky Tin Lizzie into
the present compact Ford. The potters
of Trenton no longer paint their washstands with flowers; and the makers of
typewriters exhibit a similar restraint.
Wherever this change has gone on, the
modern spirit is at home. Since this
transformation is a vital one, it affects

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157

every department of life; just as the expression of a promethean audacity

arabesque of the Renaissance painters which rose to a new occasion. Indeed,
was reproduced in sixteenth-century cos- the calculations which determine the
tume, so the severities of our mechanical system of tensions and the pattern of
design have a counterpart in dress and cables in a bridge, or the stresses and
gesture. Where this change has been im- strains in a tower, are themselves a noble
peded, the modern spirit is uneasy and human product; and the results are quite
relapses too quickly into an unctuous as capable of stirring the imagination as
sentimentalism. Indeed, where the prin- the nai'ver fantasies and empirical comciple of economy and fitness is not heed- mon sense of the handicraft worker, who
ed, the touch becomes unsure. What a had fairies and demons instead of catecontrast between the tennis costume or nary curves and vector functions to inskating costume for women to-day and spire him.
the vague fripperies of the formal eveIs any further proof needed that the
ning dress, designed according to the work of a Roebling or an Eiffel arose out
canons of conspicuous waste!
of the spirit ? One need look no farther
than the routine factory buildings, the
badly tailored iron bridges that have
VI
been put together by people without imThe third stage in design is not yet a agination, to see that technology alone is
commonplace; for it is more easy to em- not responsible for these aesthetic sucbody its principles in the making of cesses: it lays down certain conditions
machines than it is to do so in creating and means, but by itself it does not domithe products that are turned out by the nate them.
machine.
Nevertheless, good results have someFor a clear example of the second task, times been achieved in the precise arts
we must turn to the prophetic works of by a collective organization, unconscious
engineering that were produced during of the fact that it was actually producing
the nineteenth century. Just because of a work of art. This is not so paradoxical
their remoteness and because of the ob- as it may seem. When the engineers of
viousness of their imperfections, we can the excellent ventilation buildings of the
see a little more plainly the goal that is Holland Tube were told by a friend of
to be achieved. Perhaps the three great- mine that they had created a genuine
est monuments of the age were the piece of modern architecture, they were
Crystal Palace (1851), the Brooklyn surprised, and unable to attribute the
Bridge (1883)^ and the Eiffel Tower design to any single person. It was this
(1888), all of which are still standing. sort of almost instinctive collective unaIn each of these structures, despite re- nimity that led William Morris to residual weaknesses, such as the coping of fer to the great shipbuilders of Glasgow
the Brooklyn Bridge piers, or the early as the modern equivalent of the CatheL'Art Nouveau ornament on the iron- dral builders; and where such a feeling
work of the Eiffel Tower, the presence develops, one may be confident that the
of a high order of intelligence and im- third stage of machine design, which inagination is indisputable. Created with volves the complete integration of all
the aid of physics and mathematics and the functions to be performed, is on the
their special technologies, the bridge, way to achievement.
the tower, the glass-hall are likewise the
Our engineers, unfortunately, are still

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the victims of a very narrow system of

training; and they are so unconscious of
the fact that they have done the right
thing that they may, five minutes later,
commit in entire innocence an sesthetic
monstrosity. The remedy for this does
not lie in superimposing a specialist in
esthetics, a designer or an architect, but
in broadening and humanizing the content of the engineer's education, increasing his aesthetic sensitiveness as well as
his technological skill. John Roebling,
the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge,
studied architecture as well as hydraulics and mathematics, and was versed in
philosophy, which he studied under
Hegel and continued to reflect upon
throughout life. That kind of mind,
which is also the kind exhibited by a
Louis Sullivan, a Frank Lloyd Wright,
a Walter Gropius, and a Le Corbusier,
can use the machine as an instrument of
expression. When this spirit becomes
common, the crude plastic dogmatism
of the earlier type of engineering will
disappear, and we shall have a subtle
dialectics of form, capable of solving
every physical problem and enclosing
almost every relevant human impulse.
VII
The achievement of adequate machine forms is not an easy matter; and
the cultural expression of the machine
has had to fight against several refractory human impulses: dead imitativeness, snobbishness, insensitiveness to
fresh experience.
What Mr. W. F. Ogburn has happily termed the cultural lag holds with
machine design as well as with social
customs: the change in form lags behind the changed conditions of technic.
It is almost as easy under our modern
system of production to turn out a piece
of fake handicrafta machine-carved
chair-leg or a mottled antique surface-

as it is to produce a thoroughly modern

objectindeed, it is a little easier, since
a wholly adequate machine form requires a special kind of esthetic sensitiveness which is only partly achieved
through a knowledge of handicraft
forms and which cannot be developed
without the aid of a proper ideology,
to say nothing of a vast amount of experimental practice. The beauty of machine work rests upon formal relationships, and the designer may have to
work upon a single problem as long
and as patiently as the Greek builder did
on the design of the temple before the
inevitable proportions for a particular
form are worked out. Moreover, these
proportions and forms in steel and aluminum will be different from those produced by handicraft in wood; and since
habitual association takes the place in
untrained minds for active aesthetic appreciation, it is impossible for such persons offhand to accept the new forms
that the machine produces. Hence a very
fine new form, like Mies van der Rohe's
tubular chair, may be rejected by the
man in the street, who demands weight,
carvings, curlicuesalthough, where no
old associations are present, as in the
airplane, he is as ready to accept modern aesthetics as any one else.
The second obstruction to the development of machine aesthetics has been social snobbishness. Handicraft ornament
has been in the past one of the obvious
means of establishing caste and social
position. Even dreadfully inhuman arts,
like fine lace-making, which ruins eyesight, have flourished along with happier crafts because of the desire to proclaim by such fineries the power and
prestige of the wearer. Now our modern science is a collective product, and
the machine has tended to produce a
collective economy. Whatever the politics of a country may be, the machine, as

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I have pointed out elsewhere, is a com- our morals sufficiently to profit by the
munist. As the machine conquers one profound change the machine has made
department after another of production, in our lives, we shall only stultify ourit obliterates the distinctions of caste and selves by its employment. The real sofinancial status. There can be no func- cial distinction of the machine is that it
tional difference between a good ma- dissolves social distinctions. Its immedichine design for a factory-worker's ate goal is effective work; its ultimate
home and that for a professional man's; aim is leisure. But neither the work nor
in so far as money differences are still the leisure can be a blessing so long as
permitted to count for anything, they the personality that directs it is centred
can alter only the scale of things, not the upon trivial and degrading ends.
kind.
VIII
Because of a surviving desire for exThe social benefits of the machine are
clusiveness and individuality, however,
inseparable
from its canons of worka deliberate perversion of the machine
frequently takes place, even after a satis- manship and its achievements in design;
factory stage of machine design has been for it is only in academic discussions that
reached. In the treatment of motor-cars the good and the true and the beautithis takes the form of irrelevant mould- ful can be permanently separated.
Economically, the machine has given
ings and tricky shapes for the hood;
in bathrooms, it results in the introduc- us the ability to transfer work from the
tion of period styles to supplant strong human slave to the mechanical slave;
modern forms, and in the conversion of thus fulfilling the condition that Arisadmirable water-faucets into swans' totle laid down in the "Politics" for a
necks, or some similar absurdity; in free society. We have made a fact out of
typewriters and fountain pens it comes what seemed to him a fantastic imposforth as mottled color effects which sibility which proved the eternal nature
break the fine surfaces of these objects, of the institution of human slavery.
with no aesthetic gain. In short, in our This freedom is much more important
present money-ridden society, where to humane living than any mere plethomen play with poker-chips instead of ra of goods that the machine is capable
with economic and aesthetic realities, we of producing. In fact, there is a real
invent a thousand ways of disguising political division between those who
from ourselves the fact that we have would promote a grander scale of conpotentially achieved a collective econo- sumption in order to keep our mechanimy, in which the possession of goods is cal apparatus working at maximum caa meaningless distinction, and in any pacity, turning out hastily contrived
large quantitya gratuitous burden; goods to satisfy frivolous needs, and
since our characteristic goods are equal- those who would use the machine to
ly available to every person in that so- meet a stable standard of living, creating
out of the surplus energy not more
ciety, falling on the just and the unjust,
goods but leisure. The first conception
the foolish and the wise, like the rain
is the enemy of art and fine living; and,
itself.
needless to say, it is the dominant one
In the late Thorstein Veblen's classic
in a society that has no real standard of
book on "The Theory of the Leisure
life, and no coherent system of ideals
Class" these absurdities were skilfully
and ends.
analyzed. Until we modify our taste and

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i6o

T H E DRAMA OF THE M A C H I N E S

This alternative has not yet been adequately faced. A great part of our machine economies are therefore items of
waste and futility, such as the machine
sewing of clothes, which permits them
to be made out of shoddy goods, incapable of wearing beyond a very limited
period, and requiring continual replacement. Despite all such spurious efforts
to keep our productive mechanism turning, the machine economy has brought
with it, not adequately parcelled work,
but a chronic state of unemployment;
that is, leisure in a form that makes it
painfully unusable, since it is accompanied by anxiety and want and is not
distributed throughout the population.
The business man's ideal of heaven is
the continuous turnover of goods and
profits; and for the sake of achieving it,
he will employ armies of futile supernumeraries to force goods upon a market that may have no real use for them.
Socially utilized, on the other hand, the
function of the machine vyould be the
swiftest organized satisfaction of necessities, and not the wanton multiplication of fake wants, or the vociferous
wastes of competitive salesmanship, or
the infliction of an unbalanced standard
of consumption. While the animus that
led to the creation of the machine economy was narrowly utilitarian, the net result of this economy is to create a state,
paralleled by the slave civilizations of
old, endowed with an abundance of
leisure whichif not vilely misused in
the promotion of more work, either
through the demands of inventive ingenuity or consumptive ritualmay
eventuate in a largely non-utilitarian society, dedicated more fully to those
forms of play and ritual and thought
and social inter course, which make life
significant and enjoyable.
The nineteenth century satisfied itself
with the spread of machinery to new oc-

cupations and processes. During the last

generation we have taken much satisfaction in the vulgarization of its products through mass production, in the
heightening of automatism, and in the
distribution of luxuries to classes that
once slaved at a strict margin of subsistence under what was called the iron
law of wages. A weak imagination may
conceive all these processes as going on
indefinitely, the final outcome being
such a picturesque horror of exact contrivance as Zamiatin showed in "We."
But the future, on the contrary, may
modify this tendency, and not passively
continue it. We may conceive of finer
machines, of more resourceful applications of power, of airplanes that will
not crumple or dive, motors with new
sources of energy, perhaps; but we may
equally look forward to a shrinkage of
the total area occupied by the machine;
as, for example, a proper diet and the
early habitual care of the teeth will reduce the need for the marvellous technological resources of modern dentistry;
or as, again, a better conception of the
human body has already relegated to
the scrap-heap the weight-lifting apparatus of late-Victorian gymnastics.
To conceive of engineering as the central art is to forget that the central fact
of life is not mechanism but life; and
the part played by mechanism in an intelligent polity is quite different from
that which it now plays in our present
regime. The machine has given us a
noble austerity of form: its cool uninflected environment of depersonalized
functions, its background of scientific
concepts and abstract categories, all this
has cleared away potentially the hot little vulgarities of class and caste and the
childish assertive egos that went with
these things. But in order to accept such
a background as background, all the
other arts must flourish too; when our

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TRAGEDY
creative energies have no other channels
to flow into, the machine leaves a sense
of emptiness, and to compensate for this
we have the luxury and dull frivolity
that make so much of our life to-day
a weakness symbolized by the theatrical
decorations that have begun to crop out
in the entrances of our gigantic American office buildings.
In short, a fine machine ideology is an
aid to handling machines; and in order
for the machine to benefit the other arts,
they must have an integrated life of
their own. Lacking an adequate ideal
of life, lacking relation to all the other
arts of society and the personality, the
present mechanistic system tends by itself toward destruction or routineboredom, war, death. In our wretched factory towns, our depleted villages, our
overgrown financial metropolises, the
great arts of life have been either paralyzed or secluded; and the mechanical
age has created an environment in which
the spirit, curbed in its proper expression, revenges itself by primitive compensations, by drunkenness and aimless
eroticism and other forms of anaesthesia.
These defects are not inherent in the machine. They exist in ourselves; and at
most, the machine has emphasized our
weaknesses and called our attention to
them.

l6l

To fly, to talk at a distance, to overcome natural forcesthese things we

have achieved, thanks to exact science
and the associated arts. But the mythmaking functions, which produced
Prometheus, not fire, and Icarus, not
flight, are still left untouched by the Machine: what we will to be is still left unanswered by our wiU to do, or by our
success in controlling and manipulating
external forces. To preserve the efficiency of the machine as an instrument and
to use it further as a work of art, we
must alter the centre of gravity from the
external Newtonian world to that completer world which the human personality itself focusses and dominates. The
narrow interests, the intense practical
concerns, the crudely depersonahzed
standards of the older utilitarians must
undergo a complete transformation if
the fruits of this effort are to be enjoyed.
If no other forces were at work within
ourselves, causing us to redeem certain
tracts of experiences and to revivify arts
and ways of life whose understanding
and command have been lost, the machine itself would furnish a sufficient
impetus. It has conquered us. Now our
turn has come, not to fight back, but to
absorb our conqueror, as the Chinese,
again and again, absorbed their foreign
invaders.

Tragedy
BY ARTHUR GDITERMAN

H E wronged me; but quickly the pang of it perished.

For how should a wrong be remembered and cherished
When Love is a compact too dear for the pledgers
To enter each debt in account-books and ledgers ?
Though I would erase it, not asking a wherefore.
Embittered, he feels that he wronged me; and therefore
No matter what winters my friend may outlive me,
I know, to my grief, he will never forgive me!

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